


everything i wanted

by Ladylazarus13



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: A mix of images from both the TV show and books - Freeform, Book 4: Cibola Burn, Gen, I wrote it but I'm on the fence if this is romantic or not - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:20:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23289898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladylazarus13/pseuds/Ladylazarus13
Summary: Whenever Miller wanted to scream and beg for an end, give up and cross his boundaries, escape into a single second of what might be death...Julie's cool hand would reach out and take his.
Relationships: Julie Mao & Joe Miller
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	everything i wanted

**Author's Note:**

> He'd looked up at the stars from his small spot on Eros station, and he'd see Julie standing beside him. Her hair endless cascades of silky black. Though there was nothing out here in the vacuum, it framed her face, moving like she was underwater. Drowned.
> 
> "If you could do it all over again? Would you?"
> 
> "I wouldn't," he said.
> 
> _— excerpt from Leviathan Wakes_

_—_ _It reaches out. It reaches out. One hundred and thirteen times a second. It kills the Investigator. It rebuilds him. It reaches and does not understand why. It does not need to. It reaches out. It reaches out. It. Rea. Ch. Es. Out. Until it stutters. It loses momentum because the tool built to find has found too much. It pauses mid-grasp. It does not die because it does not know death. It sleeps but does not know how. Parts of it dream. Parts of it remember while the rest of it forgets. Thousands of voices screaming and silent all at once. Then you remember. You are. You are, are, are. Until you're gone, gone, gone. Again and again. Gone. In a blink, it is sleeping, and you are awake. A tool left reaching_ _—_

The sound of the air recyclers was a comforting noise for Miller. Ever since he'd been a ward of the state, curled up in some ratty donated blanket, it was a reliable, soothing sound. Miller didn't notice the hiss in the day to day minutiae. Too many damn people crowding around, shouts of lang belta, even the children playing in the small patches of green blocked the sound. But at night when he was on his fifth or sixth drink, he'd close his eyes and just listen to it whisper into the room. Eventually, Miller would answer by taking a long, deep inhale like a man knowing he was about to drown. Felt the force of it as his lungs expanded against his ribs and Belter-thin frame. Because everything else could be fucked, the last drop of water gone, but as long as Miller had air _—_ he was alive. A long time ago that meant something. But eventually, like everything else, even breathing fucking hurt. 

And the first thing Miller heard as he found consciousness again was the air pushing out to fill Ceres Station. Stale as always and so damn familiar. _Home._ Miller blinked and took a shuddering breath that made the pounding in his head even worse. The taste of moldy beer coated his tongue, and the bottles fighting for space on the small table was enough confirmation he'd passed out drunk outside again on the porch.

Miller leaned forward resting his elbows on his knees and let his head hang trying to hide from the too bright day cycle. Eventually when the world stopped spinning, Miller sat up with a groan and forced his eyes to adjust to the light. In the distance, a kite was bobbing around caught in an air stream. It's tail waved up and down like a mother's exaggerated goodbye to their nervous kid on the first day of school. Comforting because it meant: _I'll be right here. You'll know right where to find me._ At least that's how Miller imagined it would feel like. 

A sense of wrongness welled up in him before the mushroom beer rotting in his stomach got the chance. Nothing wrong or unusual about waking up hungover on his porch. Nothing unusual about kids flying kites where they shouldn't be. No, what was unusual was the quiet. So quiet he could hear the air move around him. 

Six million people and not a single voice. No movement except that damn kite. No kids kicking a ball around. No cops calling with off-color stories. No people strolling along toward home or leaving it for work. Not even a thug with a gun and a grudge waiting down below.

He squinted across the green, looking for the kid who must be right there holding the string—the kid who ran and pulled that kite up until it lifted off. But no one was there except him, and the low hum of air pushed out of half-broken, dingy filters. As if mocking him, the kite continued to bob up and down erratically. 

Running a hand over his face, Miller attempted to clear the lethargy away. He racked his thoughts, sluggish even for a hungover alcoholic. Trying to remember how this could be possible. Remember why he was alone. Figure out how an overcrowded cesspool like Ceres could be empty? He shouldn't even be on Ceres. And it was contemplating the question that did it. The why that caused the world to stutter around him like a heart in the middle of cardiac arrest. The colors of the world bloomed into versions he didn't think existed on the human spectrum of sight. Over-saturated and too bright until it seemed to pulse. Once. Twice. Three times. Until it built up a solid rhythm that could have sounded like his old heart. The sound of it forcing blood to be pushed up into his brain and, in turn, to the neurons trying to misfire like the shit they were. All trying to pump life into him. 

And then Miller remembered and so did the world. As did the Investigator who now sat on his creaking porch chair in his place. Who plucked off his hat, leaned his head back to feel the artificial light that mimicked a sun he'd never felt. Closed his eyes that were not really his eyes. He listened to the air around him that wasn't really there. But he felt Julie's cool hand reach out and take his. The Investigator smiled. 

* * *

— _It reaches out, it reaches out and tries to kill Miller. Kill the Investigator. End a program it doesn't recognize has an ending in the first place. Yanks at parts of Miller so hard something fizzles in his mind, pops then loops back. The conscious parts are desperate to make sense of the reaching out. Try to interpret it. Now he wasn't anything at all. That's not true. Miller was everything all at once. Here and not here. Miller became an entire world and the world became him. Existing and not at all and took everyone along for the ride. A bitter laugh comes from his consciousness because at least he's not alone. Not anymore._ —

Miller scoffed when the Mormon on his flight to Eros said some crackpot shit about humans becoming angels. Angels? Us? These piss-drinking sores across the universe? But even then, he thought of Julie. Her hair spread around her as if she were underwater with a smile along lips that could only be soft. And when Miller thought of her even now, he could believe at least one person was an angel. Julie could be and she was in the end. And took him with her. His Julie had been right all along. No rest for the wicked. No peace for the good.

But if this is what it felt like to be an angel, he would rather die and meet nothingness than this never-ending cascade along electrons. Old memories trotted out over and over when he only wanted silence. Some reprieve instead of this perpetual falling in and out of existence. And whenever he wanted to scream and beg for an end, give up and cross his boundaries, escape into a single second of what might be death...Julie's cool hand would reach out and take his. Tell him some strange story about angels meeting kids halfway as they fall. Squeezing his hand tight enough he thought he could feel something again. 

_No, he dreamed that._

_No, he did it once. On Eros._

_Then on Venus._

_He held her hand._

_Hadn't he?_

After the protomolecule snapped him like an elastic band again, the yellow kite was back bouncing high above the endless holes and pipes and now people. He could hear their voices this time. An old woman was humming her wedding song. A kid crying and a woman laughing. The sounds of Eros weren't so different from Ceres. Not in a way that mattered. Miller knew if he opened his eyes, their shadows would be there too if he concentrated hard enough. So instead, he looked back at his door and at Julie waiting with a smile.

The door was painted the color of a summer sky on Earth. That's what Havelock told him the first time the Earther stopped by. The kid thought it gave them something in common, this love for an Earth sky, which only irritated Miller. An Earther would always be an Earther with a longing for an open, never-ending emptiness and expect Belters to be the same. But Julie at his side laughed seeing the door. Miller knew it wasn’t malicious. Her head tilted to the side, body all flesh and bone now as it shook with laughter, _"A sky isn't, well, it's not so...aquamarine."_

The color of the door reminded him of something, and it clicks. He looked down at himself or thought he could. But he knew his body had taken on a blue glow as Eros crashed into Venus. Fireflies the same color dancing around him. The color of aqua. It sure wasn't the summer sky. 

Miller had heard some philosophical bullshit way back about how a man can't observe himself. If he thought about how he walked, he'd automatically change it. The moment thought became part of the equation well...too bad he changed the formula. It’s just how it was. Knowing yourself was a lie because true observation—true investigation of the self was impossible. 

Impossible for a human maybe. What he was now...now he was something else. 

The Investigator. Holden was staring at him, and he could feel the weight on his head. Semi's hat. And the thought of his friend pulls him back home for a single second. To Ceres. To the gambling dens and their small hands reaching for tokens. Until his hands were just too big for it. But instead of his hand caught in the pachinko's small space, it was Julie's hand that held on tight now. 

As the Investigator, his mouth was saying what it needed to say. Someday Miller will play it back, learn the words. Know them as if he said them. Because he did. Didn't he? But now he looked down at his hands and recognized himself. Knew the flesh across his palms. The one long scar faded from where he'd ripped his hand from the pachinko machine, catching the skin at the wrong angle in a rush to escape. He'd been ten then, but even in death, the scar hadn't faded. He flexed the hand, and the knuckles with their craters pushed and dipped up against the skin. Boxer knuckles from punching and fighting and scrapping. These were his hands; it's just the paint was different is all. 

Holden said something of interest and the Investigator forced Miller's eyes up. There's a lot Miller wanted to say to the kid, but the words felt like friction on his tongue. Something rough that will cut him if he tried. Break boundaries he can't cross yet. God, Miller had missed this stupid kid and he let the feeling engulf him. And it looked like Holden missed him just as much even between half-hearted threats. Someone cared he was gone. But he was here, wasn't he?

* * *

— _Seconds are now lifetimes for all of them. For Miller, especially. A lifespan less than a horsefly. An atom popping in and out of existence in some quantum mechanical nightmare. A second to exist and a second to die. It's not a surprise when it reaches in and pulls again. Dismantles him before pasting him back together. It reaches and pulls, and it's not the way Julie does it. At least she's kind. After the screaming and the pain of disintegration_ _—_ _Miller is back. Miller is Miller. Looped and started again. Watching his own life. Yet, again to Ceres. Again on Eros. Again on Venus. The hum of the air recycler, the kite weightless and bouncing on the thin current of air that smelled like fresh bread. Like coffee. Like cinnamon. Like_ _—_ _like_ _—_ _like_ _—_

_"Like home,"_ Julie whispered, and she stepped through the door into his cluttered home. Walked past the beer cans and full kitchen sink to a new door in the far back that had never been there. Julie smiled at him in a way he'd always wanted to see. It was one of her secret smiles that would have made his heart ache if it was still beating. 

She pulled the handle and the heavy metal door swung open effortlessly. Instead of an empty closet or some other fixture that the human mind would expect, it was instead somewhere on Earth. A stretch of open, unpaved road with a rusty soil that made him think of Mars. It stretched out as if he could take a cart and drive and drive and fall into a neverending splash of blue sky. Miller blinked, and Julie was beside him again, her finger playing with the scar on his right hand. He couldn't feel it really when she interlaced her fingers with his, pulling him through the doorway. As soon as he stepped through, their hands were flesh against flesh again. 

Even as the dream of an Earth breeze kissed the memory of his skin—he could still hear it. The hum of the air recycler, growing louder and louder as he stared at the glimmer of yellow in the distance where Miller assumed a sun should be. Instead the yellow kite calmly swayed back and forth against the wide-open sky in a way that terrified and excited what was left of him. Miller could only take his eyes off it to look at Julie. His Julie who could somehow still smile as they fell again and again.

Her long black hair brushed against him as she leaned up to whisper in his ear. Whisper to no one. To everyone. To him. Just him. _"Now, that's a summer sky."_

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading this weird experiment! I couldn't shake some images from Leviathan Wakes and while reading the Investigator's chapters in Cibola Burn, I kept wondering if Miller's consciousness was somewhere in the background with Julie. 
> 
> Also, the title is from the Billie Eilish song "everything i wanted". The lyrics kept reminding me of Miller and that scene from Leviathan Wakes which is in the first note.


End file.
